Jessica Chastain says actress should never be asked their age

Jessica Chastain says she can 'act' the age a part requires

Jessica Chastain feels that actresses should be allowed a degree of mystique when it comes to their agesPhoto: GETTY

By Tim Walker

7:00AM BST 26 Sep 2011

Although she concedes that it is not easy now that the information is readily available on the net, Jessica Chastain feels that actresses should be allowed a degree of mystique when it comes to their ages.

“I don’t like revealing how old I am,” the 30-year-old tells me at the Ciroc Vodka party after the premiere of her film The Debt. “I played a teenager in a movie recently and Brad Pitt’s wife in another so I like to think I can be any age I need to be.”

She says it is a lot harder for her to change shape for a part. For her upcoming role in The Help, the petite actress had to gain 15 pounds. “I’m a vegan, but my mum told me that to get a curvy figure you need to eat a lot of soy. So I ate a whole lot – and it worked.”

Bacon’s answer to unemployment

The BBC is to do its bit to tackle youth unemployment – and not merely in Salford where it has managed to create a mini-boom with its new “MediaCity.”

Richard Bacon tells Mandrake that he is to present a programme for the corporation called Up for Hire, which will be about helping young people from all over the country to find work.

“The idea is to pick people who can do placements in different companies,” the presenter says. “And they will be paid placements which could well lead somewhere.”

Although he concedes that youngsters can’t be expected to start working overnight as, say, doctors and lawyers, he says that there are a lot of positions where you can learn and develop “on the job.”

“We have got some top end companies and professions involved so it should work well,” he says.

I hope he gets the same degree of support making the programme as I did from Lord Ashdown when, during the high unemployment of the Eighties, I wrote a column for the Evening Echo in Bournemouth called, somewhat patronisingly, Let’s Get Working.

Ashdown was in those days merely an employee of Dorset County Council’s Youth Service, but I recall to this day his energy and enthusiasm when it came to devising initiatives to help youngsters find work.

Canny Cannadine

The National Portrait Gallery’s annual reports and accounts for 2010-11 make for dispiriting reading with income down 20 per cent on the year before and self-generated income down 34 per cent.

The E O Hoppe and Thomas Lawrence exhibitions just didn’t seem to have the same populist appeal as the Beatles to Bowie and Irving Penn exhibitions. Still, Prof Sir David Cannadine, the chairman of the trustees and scarcely short of a bob or two, still insists on charging for his services.

The accounts show that the balding, bespectabled historian pocketed a £400 fee “for an essay to be included in a gallery exhibition catalogue.”